Cal Yeomans
This summer I looked at the archives of Cal(vin) Yeomans—a trailblazing ‘gay’ playwright (not in the biographical sense of being homosexual—like Albee—but in the sense of representing gay life for gay audiences). One of his plays, Sunsets (1980), a three-parter about sex and love in a rural north Florida men’s room, is going to be revived in Chicago this coming February. So he may be about to have a moment! None of his plays, however, are available in print, so I’m going to post a couple of them—2/3 of Sunsets (“The Line Forms at the Rear” and “The End of the Rainbow”) and the BDSM romcom/dramedy Richmond Jim (1979).
But first, some of Yeomans’ photos for Christopher Street :
By way of an introduction to his plays, I’ll quote a bit from the essay I wrote for County Highway about him (in my most unctuously chipper magazine-friendly style—It’s not all French theory and fulminations; she’s got range!)
…the Gainesville area was home to a set of trailblazing gay writers who drew on the traditions of southern literature in innovative and sometimes shocking works. At its center was the playwright Cal Yeomans, a Florida native who returned to the area in 1978 after years in Atlanta and New York…
Yeomans, born in 1938, was the senior figure—although in 1978 he had little aesthetic achievements to show for his forty years. He had spent the previous decade unsuccessfully trying to make it in the world of avant-garde theater, writing absurdist, one-dimensional shock-mongering stuff about drag queens and transsexuals in the spirit of Andy Warhol’s films (and a lot of embarrassing confessional poetry). In the two years after his return to Florida, however, he would write a series of controversial plays that shook the burgeoning world of gay theater when they were performed in New York and San Francisco.
Richmond Jim (1979) shows a young Southern man’s journey north, into the gay leather subculture and ends with a cockring being slipped around his member by his more urbane lover, who, in a move familiar to pushy bottoms everywhere, declares himself Jim’s sex slave. Sunsets is (1980) still more outrageous: a trilogy of plays set in and around a rural Florida beachside public restroom cruised by tragic old queens (including an ancient leather daddy with a walker and catheter), a ‘straight’ guy in denial (his wife is waiting outside!), and two guys who might fall in love.
The plays depicted gay life far removed from the world that was being created in coastal metropolises. Some reviewers glowered at their staging what seemed like such tragically degraded representations of homosexuality, and others patronizingly found that Yeomans had shown the plight of backwards benighted denizens of fly-over America. As gay historian Jay Watkins has noted, Yeomans himself was ambivalent about what his plays ‘meant,’ making different statements in his letters and diary entries. He hadn’t made up his own mind whether Richmond Jim was meant to celebrate or satirize BDSM as a new urban mode of sexuality, whether its protagonist was right to shuck off his hayseed innocence and embrace uninhibited libertinage, and whether the characters of Sunsets were doomed pariahs to be ignored or pitied by coastal viewers.
The strength of the plays, in fact, is that they thrum with uncertainty, most intensely in the scenes where Southern queens vent soliloquies to rival those of Blanche Dubois. In Richmond Jim the title character’s seduction, is interrupted, in the middle of a vigorous nipple-squeeze, by an “apparition,” announcing herself as “La Countessa de Hosenvilles.” It’s Biddy, a middle-aged queen from Atlanta who’s somewhere between rural and urban, tragic and ridiculous, male and female—wearing a Marine’s coat with a big black 1930s woman’s hat and high heels. Biddy plops himself down and declares that things are getting worse “than Emma Bovary ever thought possible.” A litany outrageous complaining (guys keep asking him to drink their piss!) cockblocks the couple for a full third of the play, and when his exit at last return the mood to semi-pornographic seduction, viewers or readers are left to wonder what Yeomans had meant to achieve. Is Biddy—compellingly bitchy in a Quentin-Crisp-crossed-with-Truman-Capote way—there to deflate the eroticism, to ironically comment on it, to undo the pretenses of pure mutual masculinity that the leather-sex scene relies on? Who knows, but it sure is funny!
The same year Yeomans arrived in Florida, Andrew Holleran published his epochal novel Dancer from the Dance, which recounted his move in the opposite direction from Richmond Jim—down from New York to rural Florida—as a Great-Gatsby-esque tale of a young man becoming disillusioned with the emerging gay male New York subculture that ran from the city’s discos and bars to Fire Island. Yeomans and Holleran would become friends, with Yeomans supplying photos for Holleran’s column in the gay magazine Christopher Street, which broadened its horizons to include small-town gay life…
Holleran chronicled his life in Gainesville in essays, novels, and short stories, in which Yeomans regularly appeared either under his own name or as the character ‘Roy.’ After the controversial success of Sunsets, however, Yeomans disappeared from gay theater and wrote little. As the AIDS crisis erupted in 1981, Yeomans’ brand of sexually charged dramaturgy was less and less appealing to directors and audiences. His plays, never published, were largely forgotten, and his legacy has only recently been revived by scholars like Watkins and Carl Schanke, and the Chicago theater director David Zak, who is staging a version of Sunsets this winter (one wonders what Ron DeSantis and Chris Rufo will make of it!).
I doubt that posting this this will get at DeSantis or Rufo—or do much even to revive Yeomans’ reputation! But the plays are below… FWIW, I think they’re fun and still provocative. Although I’m not by any means an expert on the history of gay theater—the real gem of the period I think isn’t the schlock of Kramer or Kushner or Fierstein but the dark AIDS fantasy Night Sweat, which someone ought to make available for a more reasonable price! Yeomans’ plays aren’t at that level of urgent artistry, but they do move excitingly among ‘realism’ (depicting recognizable slices of urban and rural gay life), ‘politics’ (staging debates about ‘issues in the community’ [is BDSM legitimate? is the glory-hole tragic?], and spotlighting ‘marginalized voices’), and comedy, melodrama, tropes from pornography, etc., to make something that is about gay life but doesn’t forget to be art.
The plays: